Here I Am: What Looks Dormant is Not

One Year, Three and a Half Years, Many Decades from the Beginning

It’s been a year now that I’ve been back in Idaho. As someone notorious for remembering and celebrating dates, it seems significant that I forgot this one. But then, everything means nothing except for the meaning we give it.

My relationship with time has changed.

Time, I’ve discovered, is a living thing.

When I was younger, I was much more impatient. I wasn’t able to wait for its fruition, wasn’t willing to even try. Always plucking the bloom before it unfolded. Now Now Now, I wanted everything quickly. I expected change instantly.

When I bought my house in Picabo in 2008, I lost that first summer to grief. My Katrina-rescue Samoyed-mutt-mix died shortly after we moved in and then weeds took over the backyard. A four-foot, deep-rooted, thick-trunk, farm weed forest in the absence of any landscaping.

Dixie in my backyard, just after we moved in. See those weeds in the foreground that would eventually grow as tall as the fence?

The next spring, I started pulling. Digging and pulling, digging and pulling. I wanted an oasis where I could relax. A sunset view unobstructed save for a barn and some cows. A vegetable garden I could harvest. A wind block of trees, plus pears and plums and cherries. A stone patio surrounded with purple-blossomed catmint, attracting bees and hummingbirds. I wanted all of this established, flowering, and fruiting in three years, though I said three to five, not wanting to sound irrational or imperious.

Sure enough, in five years, I had a full garden with trees and shrubs and perennials cloaking the perimeter of my fence and dotting a ramshackle lawn. Ah, but in seven years it was better and at ten years it was undeniably admirable.

Time is a living thing. It needs to breathe in order to become.

We choke it too much.

I was always beating at it with a stick, rapping its behind as if to make it move faster.

Now I walk more slowly. My mind still races ahead, but something inside my chest has accepted the change. Or maybe simply resigned itself to what feels like a turtle pace when the goal is within my vision. The sluggishness is unrelenting. My feet won’t step forward the way they used to. But maybe, I have always been waiting for this, a slower movement, a struggle with my feet. I am after all (I have said for decades), a fish. A double fish. I’m meant to swim. Ah, but if that be true, I am also a horse. A fire horse. But a bit hobbled.

In Joseph Campbell’s version of the hero’s journey, the hero always returns to where they started. The journey is a circle. More accurately, a spiral. We never return to exactly the same place. In our absence, the place has changed. But it’s possible to return to the same spot and know it for the first time. This is not what we glorify. We are not good at beginner’s mind or inclined to see old places anew. We ache for things to not change, for an unquestionable familiarity. And this is often the root of our pain. We deny time, we deny evolution. If we have journeyed, the change is inside and outside. We return to where we started and it is different, because we are different.

In Jane Eyre’s Sisters, Jody Bower has a different description of the journey, one that resonates truer to my own experience. In this hero journey, there is a lot of zigzagging and meandering, nothing resembling a circle. The journey is a wandering.

This is the journey that took me to fifteen different towns and twenty-four homes. This journey got me to Sicily, and Sicily is where I want to be. Where I feel I need to be. Yet here I am, back in the Wood River Valley. The same place but not the same.

photo credit: Jan Peppler

I never stopped working for the Census when I left Tulsa and returned to Idaho. The money is decent and much needed and I like the work. It’s also good as a routine - some routine is always good for productivity - but it kicks my writing to the curb.

That’s not the only challenge.

There’s all the other work, the endless stream of things that need to get done. The renovation of Grama Clara’s house, where Tom lived for thirty years. The house standing as only an old woman can, wrinkled and weak and peeling, with various ailments and stains, but standing nonetheless. At 98 years in the States, this is no small feat. This house weeps for relief. It requires so much attenton before she can even be maintained. Painting one room alone took ten days. (I’m not kidding) It’s a slog and Tom is doing the brunt, along with a contractor. But at the same time, there are still things at our current house that I’m attending to, things that were never finished when we moved in.

top middle photo is the only bathroom, need I say more?

And then there is this relationship, my marriage. I no longer have the freedom to play with time as I did when I lived with only a dog. Writing must be done in the limited moments when I am alone and it requires time to think, to process, to ponder. Space is needed to feel what is me and not another. The time needed to read, understand, and digest cannot be rushed. While my thoughts may come quickly, my writing does not.

After nineteen years, this relationship is surprisingly somewhat fragile and new. Despite the paper that legally binds us, nothing can be assumed as it once was. We have both been uprooted. While I may long for space and silence, we are entwined now, and lean toward each other, partially for balance and partially for reassurrance. I can no longer attend to myself without also attending to him. And this, too, requires time.

Photo credit: Jan Peppler

I am pausing all paid subscriptions because I can’t currently promise weekly posts as I did for the last three and a half years. I have many thoughts and many essays that I’ve started, but finishing them requires time. And I can’t push time.

We are now officially in Autumn, when bulbs are buried in the ground. This is the dormant season, called so only because we cannot see what is happening. But there is something happening. Time. Time is ripening, and with it, so are we.

I will continue to write and post, only I can’t say with what frequency. There are many things I want to share and I hope to fall back into a comfortable weekly schedule. When exactly, I can’t say. So, while paid subscriptions are dormant, be assured that my content is not. It’s coming. It’s breathing. It’s shaping itself into something new.

As I move forward in this season, I am meditating on T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets once again. This time, East Coker.

In my beginning is my end. In succession

Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,

Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place.   (lines 1-3)

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,

     You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

In order to arrive at what you do not know

     You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

     You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

     You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not. (Lines 136-146)